Bad news and good news

I’m not the happiest guy in the world tonight after the Rays lost their fifth straight game. At least the Red Sox and Yankees both lost, so the Rays’ division lead wasn’t reduced. And I did have a great night at Durham Bulls Athletic Park with my wife, watching the Bulls win a tight 2-1 game over my hometown Rochester Red Wings.

I also felt a little better when I came home and found out that not only is Evan Longoria an All Star, but he will also participate in the Home Run Derby! It should be a very entertaining competition on Monday night. Josh Hamilton, Grady Sizemore, Lance Berkman, Chase Utley, Dan Uggla, and Ryan Braun will also be entrants. With the exception of Berkman, it’s a pretty young field, and Berkman isn’t exactly ancient.

So instead of dwelling on the negative, I’ll focus on the positive news about Longoria tonight. Speaking of Evan, I picked up two new cards of him in the last 24 hours.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Longoria in the set since he was called up to the majors in early April. I think the design of these cards is pretty good too.

From the Topps Chrome hobby box that I broke last night:

You can read about my box break at Treasure Never Buried. I was talking to JV on Google Talk and telling him about the cards I was getting as I opened the packs. I’ll assume that the title of his blog post is about him and not me 🙂

I’ll post some scans and and a summary of the cards that I got tomorrow. I also have a second box of Topps Chrome left to break. I should mention something important that I’ve learned about Topps Chrome for those of you who might be thinking about buying some. I would recommend buying retail blasters of Chrome instead of hobby boxes. Yes, you heard me right. I know that it’s a rarity for blasters to yield better results than hobby boxes, but both JV and I have been more pleased with the blasters that we’ve bought. You can check out my blaster results here. For some reason, Topps is including blue refractors and X-fractors in retail packs only. There also seem to be a higher percentage of refractors and inserts in retail. Additionally, if you buy your blaster at Wal Mart, you’ll get some very cool Dick Perez cards. The one advantage of hobby boxes is that you’ll pull autographed cards, and I was fortunate to get three of them when I only should have gotten two. Yeah, I’ve got MOJO, whatever that might be. But seriously the checklist of autographs is weak; it’s basically the same lackluster rookies whose autographs are being inserted into every product this year.